trackball
Spoot: Spotted Early keeps trackball in one place: 2 stories so far. The section currently leads with “Keychron's new mouse lets you nudge the trackball to exactly where your thumb lives” and “Slurptop's DIY laptop yanks its battery straight from the tool shed”. Keychron's T1 HE lets you nudge the trackball to exactly where your thumb lives. The Slurptop DIY Laptop yanks its battery straight from the tool shed, and it doesn't bother hiding the fact. Spoot: Spotted Early New things, caught while they're still new and a little weird. Spoot finds fresh gadgets, clever inventions, crowdfunding campaigns,… The list below is every trackball story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
Keychron's new mouse lets you nudge the trackball to exactly where your thumb lives
Keychron's T1 HE lets you nudge the trackball to exactly where your thumb lives. That's the whole trick, and it's a good one. Most side-ball mice assume your thumb is parked in a standard spot. Keychron instead built a 34mm ball that adjusts positionally, so you're not reaching or stretching. It's a small ergonomic fix that makes a big difference for people whose hands didn't read the spec sheet. The T1 HE looks more like a conventional trackball mouse than Keychron's earlier Nape Pro, which was a slim slab designed to sit flush against a keyboard. This one leans into the familiar Logitech/Kensington shape, but with that one slippery detail nobody else thought to address. Preorders are live now.
Slurptop's DIY laptop yanks its battery straight from the tool shed
The Slurptop DIY Laptop yanks its battery straight from the tool shed, and it doesn't bother hiding the fact. This chunky homemade cyberdeck wraps mini PC hardware in a body that looks like it could survive a drop off a workbench. That's the point. Slurptop borrows its power from standard tool batteries, which means you already own spares, already have a charger, and already know exactly how long they last. It's a weird, wonderful pivot away from proprietary everything. The question, as always with builds this scrappy, is whether the final kit actually ships or stays a glorious render. If you enjoy watching ambitious hardware projects stumble and sometimes survive, our coverage of the Atari VCS's decade-long death crawl is worth circling back to.